More Peter King: Too many conservatives have become Michael Moores on this NSA thing

posted at 6:01 pm on June 12, 2013 by Allahpundit

A new communique from the Lindsey Graham of the House via Mediaite. He doesn’t specify what crosses the line from legit concern about the extent of the surveillance state into Michael Moore-style adversarial socialism, but King being King, I’m guessing he thinks it’s a short journey. If he means that Snowden shouldn’t be hero-worshipped, I agree, although I know some libertarians in “hero” mode right now who’d be surprised to find that they qualify as neo-Moores because of it.

One of the petty annoyances in debating the NSA/PRISM revelations is having people on one far end of the liberty/security spectrum push you into defending people on the other far end of the spectrum through the sheer force of their demagoguery. Case in point: Watch King accuse Glenn Greenwald of threatening to leak the names of CIA agents as part of the Snowden revelations. Has Greenwald actually done that? As best as I can tell, no, not at all. On the contrary, Snowden said in his video interview with Greenwald that he could have released that information if he was interested in endangering U.S. personnel rather than exposing a program in general terms which he felt the public had a right to know about. But he isn’t, so he hasn’t. Greenwald’s said that there are more leaks coming but he’s never said anything about IDing Americans in the field being part of it. Andy Levy flagged this part of King’s interview, in fact, and Greenwald responded:

The perverse irony of King calling people out for enabling terrorism is that he himself, notoriously, apologized for the IRA for years. Read this Michael Moynihan piece at Reason from 2011 noting that King has never really repented for it either. I’ll leave you with this, also from Moynihan, to add a little extra nuance to King’s own liberty/security calculus:

Peter King complained in the 80s about govt eavesdropping, claiming that the FBI was opening mail sent to him from Ireland.

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